August means that the summer is almost over, and if your business had interns, they are likely about to head back to school. Unlike a general student employee, an internship may not continue into the fall and your intern may end up somewhere else next summer. In short, as the summer wraps up you’ll want to make sure that your interns got the most out of their experience at your business.
Let your interns share their work
A great culmination of an internship is letting interns showcase everything they’ve been working on and what they’ve learned. Set up time where interns can present their projects not only to their manager, but also to other employees at the business. This lets interns receive valuable feedback on their work and communication skills from people with varied career experience, and creates a final product to help capstone what they learned.
Help craft an intern’s portfolio
Sometimes internships involve working with confidential projects or data, and it can be difficult to know how to describe the amount and impact of the work an intern accomplished without revealing anything. Tell interns what numbers and information they can share externally.
Suggest that interns record all of the projects they completed over the summer so they remember them in the future. If an intern already started updating their resume, review what they wrote to help make sure they’ve pitched their work well. If they haven’t, share what you think some of their most impressive accomplishments were and what they might want to highlight.
Provide a formal evaluation
If your business has an evaluation tool for your employees, use the same one for interns. Being evaluated lets interns know what their strengths and weaknesses are so they can improve moving forward, and also provides a taste of what they’ll encounter with a real job. Plus, it will be helpful to have performance documented so you can easily remember someone’s work if you’re asked to be a reference later on.
Be a resource for the future
If your intern did a really great job, make sure to let them know! If you’re willing to write a letter of recommendation, tell them--knowing they already have a supporter is a lot less stressful for them than asking for a recommendation cold.
Even though your intern may not be returning to your business next summer, you’ve already invested time into teaching them. Offer to answer questions they may have in the future about your industry, interviewing, job searching, etc. You’ve spent time working with your intern and are familiar with their interests and strengths, so by drawing on all your personal experience you can offer a lot of beneficial insight into a student’s career even after the summer ends.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
The Daily’s rocky performance shows legacy brands create digital advantages
The News Corp’s launch of the tablet newspaper The Daily in February 2011 was heralded as the future of news and revealing opportunities for major new entrants in the news market. After a year and a half of operation, the digital newspaper has lost more than $30 million, managed to gain only 100,000 subscribers—not a trivial amount but low for a global player, and has just announced that it is cutting 1/3 of its editorial staff and ending original production of sports news and commentary.
Journalistically The Daily is not a bad news product and its app is facile and effective. So why hasn’t it been more successful? The fundamental problem is that the digital-only paper has been overshadowed by the success of legacy print newspaper brands in the market for digitally delivered news.
The Daily has never been so brilliantly written and edited that it could gain the significant attention and acclaim needed to overcome the brand advantages of legacy news providers. Major newspaper—such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times—have used the strengths of their reputations and brands to make the largest inroads in digital subscriptions. Concurrently, larger
local and regional players have also been grabbing paid digital customers in their markets and providing additional competition to the digital startup.
The Daily has also had to compete with widespread availability of free digital news from news providers such as BBC.com, CNN.com and aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google. These have all been successful in attracting consumers who are less attached to print news providers and paid services.
Those who predict the demise of legacy newspaper companies often forget the critical importance of the credibility and trust those companies have with news consumers and many assume that print organizations cannot transform themselves into digital players that may become so successful they may one day drop their print editions.
Brands are important for habitual news consumers and they tend to be highly loyal consumers of specific news brands. The Daily has been unsuccessful in breaking that loyalty, but more successful in creating relationships with persons who have not been strongly bonded to legacy brands. It remains to be seen whether News Corp. will be willing to maintain a relatively small news digital brand among its holdings, even if it manages to move The Daily into operating profitability.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The Business August 1st 2012, "The 2012 Summer Of London" Edition
In just the first 24 hours of the 2012 Olympics, more than 60 hours of footage was on TV. AND WE STILL CAN’T GET ENOUGH. The incredible athletes, the tear jerking and inspiring stories, and BOB COSTAS, BOB COSTAS, BOB COSTAS. Since we can’t catch a flight out to fill in one of those much maligned empty seats, we are bringing YOU the gold this Wednesday night, so you can take an Olympic break, breath some fresh air and catch some live entertainment. Live entertainment that is less likely to make you feel like a failure for not trying harder at 5 years old.
Our guests this week are real champions.
The comedy of Kevin O'Shea centers around one thing, the truth. He is full of the truth. He has an over abundance of truth. Some people say that he has too much truth for his own good. These people are right. Last week a doctor found truth in Kevin's urine. He needs your help now more than ever, as he faces a never ending series of painful dialysis treatments. (If you read this to yourself in a BOB COSTAS voice, and don’t cry, it’s because you’re a robot.)
We will also be joined by Red Scott. When not on stage, Red explores the myriad of ways an individual can be indoors and fully protected from the sun. His podcast discussing Game of Thrones, “Boars, Gore, and Swords” has twice been featured on BoingBoing. He performs all over the Bay Area, and is a regular at The San Francisco Punch Line, The San Jose Improv, Rooster T Feathers, as well as the usual dive bars and laundromats.
We also welcome Jeff Kreisler, Winner of the Bill Hicks Spirit Award for Thought Provoking Comedy, radio host on PRN, regular on Showbiz Tonight & MSNBC, writer for Comedy Central, IFC, TheFinalEdition.com & TheStreet.com, cast member of Shoot The Messenger, author of the bestselling "Get Rich Cheating," exec editor of "My Wall Street Journal," and star of hit international festival shows, Jeff Kreisler explores politics, business, culture, and life with passion, absurdity, and hope. Jeff now lives in New York City where he enjoys his newborn son, naps, commas and run on sentences.
“There's like five women pregnant at my office. I've taken to falling down the stairs when I leave just to be safe.”- Colleen Watson. I won’t say anything TOO nice about Colleen, as I know she is skilled in the art of compliment avoidance, (“Some nice woman complimented me on my comedy at an open mic. I replied, ‘You have low standards.’ I need to work on taking compliments. “- Colleen Watson.) but you can find these and other hilarious Colleen quotes @colleen_watson and you can see her with us this week!
Alex and the Chrises (Chrisi?) are down in LA, getting ready for the arrival of the whole Business crew for our Friday Aug 3rd show at NerdMelt with Guy Branum and Bobcat Goldthwait . Sean, Bucky and Caitlin will be here holding down the fort.
Word to the wise- The Business has been selling out! Be there on time to make sure you get a seat. No one will be turned away without a high five.
Our guests this week are real champions.
The comedy of Kevin O'Shea centers around one thing, the truth. He is full of the truth. He has an over abundance of truth. Some people say that he has too much truth for his own good. These people are right. Last week a doctor found truth in Kevin's urine. He needs your help now more than ever, as he faces a never ending series of painful dialysis treatments. (If you read this to yourself in a BOB COSTAS voice, and don’t cry, it’s because you’re a robot.)
We will also be joined by Red Scott. When not on stage, Red explores the myriad of ways an individual can be indoors and fully protected from the sun. His podcast discussing Game of Thrones, “Boars, Gore, and Swords” has twice been featured on BoingBoing. He performs all over the Bay Area, and is a regular at The San Francisco Punch Line, The San Jose Improv, Rooster T Feathers, as well as the usual dive bars and laundromats.
We also welcome Jeff Kreisler, Winner of the Bill Hicks Spirit Award for Thought Provoking Comedy, radio host on PRN, regular on Showbiz Tonight & MSNBC, writer for Comedy Central, IFC, TheFinalEdition.com & TheStreet.com, cast member of Shoot The Messenger, author of the bestselling "Get Rich Cheating," exec editor of "My Wall Street Journal," and star of hit international festival shows, Jeff Kreisler explores politics, business, culture, and life with passion, absurdity, and hope. Jeff now lives in New York City where he enjoys his newborn son, naps, commas and run on sentences.“There's like five women pregnant at my office. I've taken to falling down the stairs when I leave just to be safe.”- Colleen Watson. I won’t say anything TOO nice about Colleen, as I know she is skilled in the art of compliment avoidance, (“Some nice woman complimented me on my comedy at an open mic. I replied, ‘You have low standards.’ I need to work on taking compliments. “- Colleen Watson.) but you can find these and other hilarious Colleen quotes @colleen_watson and you can see her with us this week!
Alex and the Chrises (Chrisi?) are down in LA, getting ready for the arrival of the whole Business crew for our Friday Aug 3rd show at NerdMelt with Guy Branum and Bobcat Goldthwait . Sean, Bucky and Caitlin will be here holding down the fort.
Word to the wise- The Business has been selling out! Be there on time to make sure you get a seat. No one will be turned away without a high five.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Facebook's business problems are symptomatic of many large digital firms
Facebook is wrestling with a business challenge more traditionally found in legacy media: how do you translate consumers that don’t think they have a commercial relationship with you into relationships that that other firms will pay for?
Despite 955 million active users and increasing revenues, the company has lost a third of its share value since its IPO in the spring. The exuberance that surrounded its IPO and overpriced its shares has worn off and investors are realizing that being big isn’t enough to ensure business success. Its latest earnings reports show the firm lost money, $157 million, in the second quarter on income of $1.18 billion.
Despite 955 million active users and increasing revenues, the company has lost a third of its share value since its IPO in the spring. The exuberance that surrounded its IPO and overpriced its shares has worn off and investors are realizing that being big isn’t enough to ensure business success. Its latest earnings reports show the firm lost money, $157 million, in the second quarter on income of $1.18 billion.
Facebook’s challenges are symptomatic of a long line of “successful” digital firms that are experiencing monetization problems, including Yahoo, You Tube, AOL, and Twitter. Despite large numbers of users globally, they still lack effective business models to generate revenue levels congruous with their size. They may provide great communication functions for users, but they are not transforming very well from innovative users of technologies to highly profitable commercial enterprises.
Part of their challenge is that they have to focus so much effort on non-paying customers and those customers think of the services as personal communications—making them resistant to many efforts to monetize them. This problem has long plagued traditional media, but they are conceived as mass rather than personal media and have been around so long that many people are now used to a certain level of commercial exploitation. They also have a proven track record of return on advertisers’ investments that digital media have not yet been able to deliver for many types of advertisers.
Large digital players will continue to evolve and can be expected to improve their financial performance over time, but it will take a good deal of innovative thinking about the business rather than about the technologies and social value of their services.
Monday, July 23, 2012
The Business July 25th 2012, "The Regulars get Irregular" Edition
The Business has much to celebrate! Change is in the air. In exciting but bittersweet news, the imminent departure of beloved Businessman Chris Garcia to the wilds of LA means that we have just a few more opportunities to see him do his Business while he’s still reppin the 415. Don’t miss this one! Chris Thayer is down there already, so it seems The Business will soon have the Los Angeles Chris market cornered!
We also have some excellent guests joining us this week.
We are happy to welcome three time Laugh Factory Fresh Faces winner Stroy Moyd to the show. Stroy’s energetic and eccentric brand of comedy has made him a favorite at comedy clubs and campuses across the nation. Within one year of arriving to Hollywood, Moyd has already produced two of Los Angeles' hottest comedy shows, the Laugh Bowl at the Laugh Factory and Young Funny Sundays at the Improv. The owner of the Laugh Factory, Jamie Masada, called Moyd "the next Redd Foxx". He is also producing excellent shows here in the Bay Area, we are happy he has a night free to stop by and Business with us.
Dave Schilling is a stand-up comic and the host of a monthly comedy variety show, Hottt Newww Videooo!!! w/ Dave Schilling, at the Hollywood Improv Lab in Los Angeles, CA. He is currently working on the writing staff of the web series, How It Should Have Ended, for the Machinima YouTube network. Soon you can see him in the feature film adaptation of Tao Lin's novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel, which is currently making the rounds of the festival circuit. He also likes to write about himself in the third person (which is convenient for us in the first person plural).
As always, the show is just $5 and your Burritos are welcome.
2 for 1 coupons at http://
Speaking of things to celebrate, The Business has been selling out. If you want to secure your seat, arrive before 8!!
If we sell out, no one will be turned away without a high five.
We also have some excellent guests joining us this week.
We are happy to welcome three time Laugh Factory Fresh Faces winner Stroy Moyd to the show. Stroy’s energetic and eccentric brand of comedy has made him a favorite at comedy clubs and campuses across the nation. Within one year of arriving to Hollywood, Moyd has already produced two of Los Angeles' hottest comedy shows, the Laugh Bowl at the Laugh Factory and Young Funny Sundays at the Improv. The owner of the Laugh Factory, Jamie Masada, called Moyd "the next Redd Foxx". He is also producing excellent shows here in the Bay Area, we are happy he has a night free to stop by and Business with us.
Dave Schilling is a stand-up comic and the host of a monthly comedy variety show, Hottt Newww Videooo!!! w/ Dave Schilling, at the Hollywood Improv Lab in Los Angeles, CA. He is currently working on the writing staff of the web series, How It Should Have Ended, for the Machinima YouTube network. Soon you can see him in the feature film adaptation of Tao Lin's novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel, which is currently making the rounds of the festival circuit. He also likes to write about himself in the third person (which is convenient for us in the first person plural).As always, the show is just $5 and your Burritos are welcome.
2 for 1 coupons at http://
Speaking of things to celebrate, The Business has been selling out. If you want to secure your seat, arrive before 8!!
If we sell out, no one will be turned away without a high five.
Friday, July 20, 2012
The Business LA with GUY BRANUM and BOBCAT GOLDTHWAIT!
Oh Los Angeles.
Ohhhhhh Los Angeles.
It's been a while since the Business and Los Angeles got friendly, and SO MUCH has been going on. We need to talk all about it when we return to The Nerdist Theater at Meltdown on Friday August 3rd. And we're returning bigger and better than before. How we doin' that you ask? Check it out:
Not just will all original members of the Business (Alex Koll, Sean Keane, Bucky Sinister and Chris Garcia) be on hand to get funny, but our two newest recruits will be with us: Caitlin Gill and Chris Thayer. It's time to show LA what out sold-out crowds in SF already know: These two are the BUSINESS! Real talk.
What else? How about two amazing guests: Comedian/writer/actor/
Plus, as always, the Medically Transported Burrito Raffle and more...
Tickets are $10 at the door, but $8 online with NO SERVICE CHARGE!
Get tickets here:
http://nerdmeltla.com/
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